For many reasons – starting with complexity – global finance is not obvious material for a studio film. Then pile on the distinctly unsexy nature of the subject, the fact that the investment banks increasingly have their hands in Hollywood, and the dislike for self-flagellatory inquests in America that sank almost every Iraq-war movie. Paramount’s The Big Short, though, is the latest to buck those odds. A haul of $68.5m (£48.7m) worldwide, including a healthy $50m from the US, means this exposé of the 2008 global financial crash has already met the bottom line on a $28m budget. You don’t need megamillions to stage a drama set in a bunch of Manhattan boardrooms (especially if, as surely happened here, all your stars drop their usual fees). The fiscally circumspect The Big Short doesn’t share the big-spending philosophy of 2013’s $100m The Wolf of Wall Street, which is the most morally ambiguous of the post-credit crunch films and, interestingly, also by far the most successful ($392m).

The Big Short, perhaps with awards season in mind, has been sold more conservatively – according to the trailers, it’s a kind of inverted Ocean’s Eleven in which the starry ensemble of outsiders games the system – but fundamentally it’s a cautionary tale about the US economy. The film, though, presents an intriguingly hectic, data-epoch comedy with no clear protagonist that builds partly on the flippant info-asides from The Wolf of Wall Street, but with greater purpose. It’s surely this originality that has allowed The Big Short to hold strongly in the US since the wide-release debut on Christmas Day (its weekly box office dropping consecutively by 14%, 31.9%, 15.8%, then an Oscar nominations boost of 1.2% this weekend). Presumably, with a scattered rollout, it’s also being drip-fed out internationally – the better to allow a tricky proposition to percolate through naturally. The funny-serious tonal overload feels in tune with the times, unlike the laboriously traditional Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which plodded to a disappointing $134.7m globally in 2010 on a $70m budget. Hardly a winning return. The other major post-crash work, JC Chandor’s Margin Call, was a smaller affair and, like The Big Short, essentially prudent, taking $19.5m on a $3.5m outlay. What The Big Short, Wolf of Wall Street and, looking further back, the likes of Trading Places all tell us is that a little lolz go a long way portraying this most abstract and obfuscating of worlds.

Michael Lewis: the scourge of Wall Street

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The war movie

When Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper vaulted the barricades and ended up in blockbuster territory with $547.4m worldwide at the start of last year, we were promised a flood of patriotic war movies. A poor US opening for Michael Bay’s Libya-set action movie, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, may put that assault on hold – or at least in line for a rethink. It managed a $16m fourth-place debut, compared to American Sniper’s $89m. Admittedly, it was always going to tough on paper for Bay’s star-less action film to match its predecessor, with the latter’s venerated director, rising lead actor (Bradley Cooper), and a release that coincided with the initial shock over Isis. American Sniper was also a more nuanced reflection on the price of the US’s foreign interventions, enabling the film to connect beyond the Guns&Ammo crowd. Scott Mendelson, writing for Forbes, makes a strong case that the concerted effort to market 13 Hours to America’s red-state faithful – as well as its possible partisan use against Hilary Clinton, secretary of state when the Benghazi diplomatic compound was attacked – has been a turn-off for more moderate audiences. As in life, in art the unilateral approach isn’t always best. It’s optimistic to think Bay and studio Paramount can rely on overseas audiences to bail them out. That would be ironic – another thing that has the director reaching for the big-explosion button.

The endurance test

With a budget that galloped off in the direction of $135m, The Revenant looked like it would be taking a long trudge to profitability. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu seems, however, to have found the shortcut. Two weeks into release, and it’s already on $146.3m worldwide – so, taking into account the spend on marketing, roughly halfway to hitting black on a project that had the hubris-o-meter flashing like mad. This past week’s 12 Oscar nominations for the film, leading the pack of contenders, no doubt helped bump it up in its first big international week: the UK ($7.8m) and South Korea ($5.7m), among the 15 new territories, opened higher than The Wolf of Wall Street and Django Unchained, star Leonardo DiCaprio’s last two pictures. DiCaprio, as discussed last week, looks to be having a similar effect on The Revenant’s box-office clout as he did on Django Unchained. The new film is already Iñárritu’s top grosser, a clear $50m beyond the director’s lifetime total for Oscar-winner Birdman ($103.2m). The Revenant is a similar piece of awards bait, but Fox have expanded its potential by not only emphasising the kind of virtuosic technique on display in Birdman, but by selling it hard as an upmarket action film. That, DiCaprio and the awards heat together seem to have smoothed what could have been an arduous road – and there are still 53 markets to come.

Ray Mears fact-checked The Revenant

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Beyond Hollywood

Two Chinese releases stepped into the gap left by the fast-fading Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Boonie Bears III, adapted from the TV series and a sequel to 2015’s Mystical Winter, the country’s highest-grossing animation ($44.3m). With a look a bit more textured and polished than some of the distinctly rough-looking local competition, it got off to a $16m start for sixth place globally. In at nine with $11.5m is comedy Royal Treasure, retitled from Ultimate Challenge – about a time-travelling princess who makes a beeline for the future to find a husband, accompanied by her six royal guards.

The future

With The Hunger Games done for the time being and the Maze Runner and Divergent franchises showing inconclusive results, battle resumes on the young-adult front. The newcomer is Sony’s The 5th Wave – already on deck in 30 territories, with the US and UK among 15 extra this coming weekend. Kick-Ass’s Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a girl trying to save her younger brother in an alien-ravaged, post-apocalyptic future drawn from Rick Yancey’s novel series.

The US and bits of eastern Europe get Dirty Grandpa, in which Robert De Niro teams up with Zac Efron as an under-inhibited OAP on a road trip. Another notch for De Niro: The Fun Years, there’s definitely a “tragi” component to his latter-day comedy work, in the light of his groundbreaking early career. But maybe this, directed by Borat screenwriter Dan Mazer, will be funny. Adventurous American film-goers with an eye on the future of cinema can also check out Monster Hunt this weekend; whether by box-office skulduggery or hard-headed commercial nous, China’s current highest-grossing film ever. Over in Bollywood, 2015’s most ubiquitous actor, Akshay Kumar, gets 2016 going with Airlift, a thriller about efforts to evacuate Indian citizens during the first Gulf war. Not so pressing a matter that there won’t be time for a bit of song and dance.